Digital Tutors – Introduction to Tracking in After Effects

In this series of lessons we’ll learn how to use the tracker built in to After Effects to analyze real life footage and find the movement of objects. This is an important technique for matching an image or animation’s position, rotation, scale and perspective skewing to footage.
We’ll begin this project by doing a simple one point track using some easy footage and how to apply that movement information to other layers. We’ll then learn how to do a two point track on real footage and create a black-bar effect over someone’s eyes. Lastly, we’ll track the four corners of a television screen to replace the image on the screen. We’ll then learn some tips for getting a track from difficult footage using color correct techniques.

1. Introduction and Project Overview
2. Getting Started with the Tracker: 1 Point Tracking
3. Connecting Tracker Data to Layers
4. Creating a Two Point Track
5. Four Point Tracking
6. Using a Channel Blur to clean a 4 point track
7. Compositing the reflection onto the 4 point track
8. How to edit tracking data points
9. Creating a clean track using color correction techniques
10. Stabalizing Footage using the Tracker